Albert Rafols-Casamada

Colour first! Poles apart from Tàpies or Saura - his contemporaries who attracted more media attention - and their sombre, tormented works, Albert Ràfols-Casamada's painting is not just luminous but radiant. Because, for this most Mediterranean of Spanish artists, the world is an ensemble of chromatic vibrations that have to be transcribed onto the canvas. Beyond the references to the French trilogy - Cézanne, Matisse, Braque - scattered throughout his works, the Catalan painter found a path somewhere between Rothko's mysticism and Mondrian's Constructivism amid an interplay of colours and their expressive force.

The sole objective that he sought in his twoflod career as painter and poet was to use a vocabulary that showed the essence of things.